


History Like Gravity [A Married Remix]

by IndigoNight



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, emotions are hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-07 07:58:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13430376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndigoNight/pseuds/IndigoNight
Summary: “I’m looking for my husband,” Steve says quietly, and it’s a struggle to keep his voice level.“That’s a waste of time,” Tony responds dismissively.“You aren’t him.”Tony tilts his head at Steve, moving a few paces closer. “No, I’m not,” he answers. “Not any more. Your husband was a fuck up. He was weak and pathetic and overly emotional.”





	History Like Gravity [A Married Remix]

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [My Mallory Heart [Add Violence Remix]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13358121) by [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar). 



> For the 2018 Cap-IM Remix Relay. Thanks to the mods for putting this together.
> 
> This relay is part of the Fruit Chain; you can find the full [masterlist](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cap_Ironman_Relay_Remix_2018/profile) on the Collection profile page. The order of the chain goes:  
> Fruit Chain
> 
>   1. As a Rope to a Drowning Man (A Living Armor Remix) (616, 1344 words) by Muccamukk
>   2. My Mallory Heart [Add Violence Remix] (616, 2953 words) by Kiyaar
>   3. History Like Gravity [A Married Remix] (MCU, 4654 words) by IndigoNight 
>   4. Hour of Lead (616, 1166 words) by Ironlawyer Patch (616, 1070 words) by dawittiest
>   5. The Voice of Time Cries to Man: Advance! (A Remix Foreshadowed) (616, 2594 words) by Muccamukk
> 

> 
> Forever, eternal, unending thanks to [critter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jsaer/pseuds/afearsomecritter), without whom this fic definitely would not have happened at all.
> 
> Title inspired by Come To Me by the Goo Goo Dolls.
> 
> Enjoy!

“You know FRIDAY can monitor me just fine. You don’t have to physically come down here.”

Steve isn’t surprised by the sound of Tony’s voice, or at least, he figures he shouldn’t be. The room is mostly cast in long shadows, almost completely dark around the edges with only the containment chamber in the center of the room fully illuminated. 

Tony hasn’t even turned to look at Steve, and Steve can’t help but to feel a little bit relieved. Tony is standing on the far side of the circular containment chamber, staring off into the dark shadows on the other side of the room. The cot they’d furnished the chamber with for him looks untouched, even though it’s nearly three AM. So are the clothes folded neatly at the foot of the cot - Tony has inexplicably chosen to remain barefoot and bare chested, wearing only the dirty, ripped pants of what had once been a ridiculously expensive suit.

“You can’t actually be surprised I’m here,” Steve finds himself saying. He can’t resist moving closer to the chamber, though he stops short of actually pressing his hand against the transparent wall separating them.

“I never said I was,” Tony points out. It’s jarring every time Tony talks, the flat cadence of his voice unsettling and wrong; a part of Steve keeps waiting to get used to it, but the rest of him desperately hopes he won’t get the chance to.

“Right.” Steve can’t think of anything else to say. He honestly doesn’t know why he’s down here - he has spent the past four hours since Natasha had convinced him to “go to bed” watching Tony via the camera feed anyway. He swallows hard, unable to pull his eyes away from Tony’s broad shoulders, the musculature of his back. “Do you… do you need anything?” he asks, stilted and awkward. He feels as though his heart has been ripped out, leaving his chest an open, gaping wound - which is metaphorical, but strangely appropriate for the situation.

Tony lets out a sound that’s almost a laugh, except for there’s no humor behind it, there’s  _ nothing _ behind it, just an empty, meaningless sound to fill the dead space. “I don’t need anything,” he answers, and Steve could swear that he almost,  _ almost  _ sound patronizing. 

Steve wants nothing more than to put in the access code to open the containment chamber just so that he can go in there and shake Tony. Or kiss him. Or just do  _ something _ to fix this.

Finally, Tony turns around, and it’s like getting hit in the chest by a tank - again. While he’d just been staring at Tony’s back, Steve had almost managed convince himself at that he’s over reacting, that he’d somehow exaggerated the wrongness, that  _ his _ Tony is still in there somewhere. But looking at Tony straight on, staring into foreign eyes from less than ten feet away - there’s no Tony left in his face any more. It’s eerily blank, not a flicker of expression to be found, and his previously warm, brown eyes are now a metallic liquid gold color.

“You’re staring,” Tony says, his voice inflection-less. And he isn’t wrong, Steve definitely is staring and he doesn’t even feel compelled to apologize for it. 

It isn’t just Tony’s face - the lack of  _ Tony  _ in it - there’s also the massive piece of metal buried in his chest. It’s not the arc reactor, Steve had gotten used to that, almost started to like it a little before Tony had gotten rid of it. This thing is dug into his left breast rather than centered over his sternum, and instead of the familiar blue glow it’s just a smooth, dull metallic color. It’s oblong, about two inches in length, and buried into Tony’s chest so deeply that the skin around it is swollen over the edges. It hadn’t started out that way - only three days ago it had been perched on top of Tony’s skin. They still don’t even know what the thing is or where it actually came from. Tony had gone missing from a charity event, only to show up the next morning with the thing on his chest and no memory of where he’d been, no explanation at all - or at least not one he’d been willing to share. 

“I’m looking for my husband,” Steve says quietly, and it’s a struggle to keep his voice level.

“That’s a waste of time,” Tony responds dismissively.

“You aren’t him.”

Tony tilts his head at Steve, moving a few paces closer. “No, I’m not,” he answers. “Not any more. Your husband was a fuck up. He was weak and pathetic and overly emotional.”

“No, he wasn’t-” Steve bristles instinctively at the words; if they had come out of any other mouth he wouldn’t hesitate to punch the person saying them. He slams his mouth shut so hard that his teeth grind together and distantly he realizes that his hands have actually balled into fists. “He isn’t,” he corrects himself, because he can’t do that, he can’t think of Tony in the past tense. 

Tony makes a dismissive sound, his eyes sliding away from Steve to flick around the room. “This is a waste of time, you know,” he says. “I could be actually getting something useful done.”

“We can’t let you out,” Steve says, though it feels strangely fragile, like he’s making excuses. “You’ve been compromised by an unknown entity. Unless you want to tell us what exactly that thing in your chest is and how it got there?” 

Steve waits, unable to decide whether he’s dreading Tony’s response or not, but Tony doesn’t say anything. Instead he turns his back again, the motion decidedly dismissive. Steve sighs, blinking hard against the tears starting to well up in his eyes. He gives Tony two minutes to change his mind and re-engage, but Tony shows no indication of doing so. So Steve bites his lip until it bleeds and turns away, heading for the elevator and their empty bed.

*****

He tilts his head, the image on the screen - wall, it’s a wall, in a prison - shifting in response to his intent as he tracks Rogers’ progress through the building.

_ … Steven Stark just sounds ridiculous, Tony... _

He shakes his head, trying to dislodge the strange clip of audio recording that floats through it.

_ Delete file _ , he tries, scowling at the distraction.

_ Denied _ .

That is highly inefficient. But he brushes it aside to be dealt with later. On the camera feed St-  _ Rogers _ has made it to the penthouse floor of the Tower now. He’d been clinging to the railing inside the elevator, and when he moves he does it slowly, his posture indicating great pain.

Tony blinks and the feed changes from the elevator camera to the one of the ones covering the large main living room of the penthouse suite, and then to the main bedroom. Rogers barely pauses to take his shoes off before he crawls into the bed. He pulls the blankets up all the way over his head, and then stops moving.

Tony wastes ninety-three seconds continuing to watch the unmoving lump of blankets. Then he shuts off the feed in favor something more productive.

*****

They can’t keep Tony stuck in the containment cell forever. No matter how many tests they run on him - physical and psychological - they can’t figure out what actually happened to him beyond the fact that the strange metal device implanted in his chest has wrapped living,  _ growing _ metal entirely around the tissue of his heart. 

It’s changed him. Steve still can’t even entertain the notion of Tony being  _ dead _ , but he isn’t the Tony that Steve loves any more. He’s gone flat, emotionless;  _ robotic _ , for lack of a better term. After two weeks of being contained Tony argues it is “illogical” to keep him locked up, that if Vision is trusted to walk around unsupervised he should be too. It takes the team three more weeks of hot debate to give in; although most of the reasoning in favor of keeping him contained becomes moot when they realize that he’s been - somehow, inexplicably - accessing FRIDAY’s servers to work on coding projects anyway. Vision, Bruce, and Natasha all dig thoroughly through every file that he’s touched since he’d… he’d lost his humanity or whatever this is, and none of them find anything nefarious. As far as any of them can tell all he’s doing is continuing the same projects he was working on before - updating Avengers gear and tools, refining arc reactor technology for battery purposes, new upgrades for the StarkPhone and StarkPad lines, and a seemingly endless list of other things that Steve doesn’t really understand but the others are all convinced have no nefarious purposes.

So they let Tony out of containment. And Tony moves into his workshop. Nothing short of aliens or a DoomBot invasion can pry him back out; left to his own devices he wouldn’t eat, and if he sleeps anymore Steve doesn’t know about it. 

Months pass and it doesn’t get easier. He is still Tony, except for all of the ways he’s not. It’s unnerving, heart wrenching, and utterly distracting. Steve does his best to maintain his routines, because what else is he supposed to do? He gets up in the morning and goes for his run. He brings Tony a breakfast plate - which Tony consistantly tries to ignore until Steve badgers him into eating  _ something _ . He runs training sessions with various members of the team, and devises new team maneuvers. He files paperwork and fields angry phone calls from various government officials. He brings Tony another plate of food for dinner. And finally he retreats to the penthouse, where he spends his nights laying in a bed that is too big, too empty, and too cold.

Some days, even Steve questions why he still does it. Why he forces himself to go down into that workshop, why he keeps trying to talk to a man who shows absolutely no interested in him and would clearly just as soon be left alone. The workshop had once been a beautiful, comfortable place to Steve, an exterior reflection of Tony’s true being, messy and strange but so amazing; but as the months pass it just becomes cold and personality-less. And Steve hates it, he hates everything about it with his whole being.

But he’d stood up in front of all of their friends and promised  _ for better or worse _ as he’d slid a ring onto Tony’s finger. This is definitely worse. This is a whole different kind of worse than probably anyone else who’s ever made those vows had cause to expect, and yet Steve sort of feels like he should have seen this - maybe not  _ this _ exactly, but something like this - coming. It doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how little of his husband is left to be found in the man, Steve isn’t about to abandon him.

*****

Tony stares at the gleaming piece of gold encircling his finger -  _ gold _ of course refers to the coloring, the metal is actually a titanium compound. It’s distracting, hindering his work, and highly impractical. The piece of metal could easily catch on any of the many high powered tools necessary for his work and there is a statistically very high probability of it causing irreparable damage to his body. Which would be a great inconvenience. 

And yet… he doesn’t take it off.

The hour is late and the building is quiet, most of its residents wasting useful hours on sleep. He is halfway through building new upgrades for the Towers’ self defense systems. It’s an important project, and yet he keeps wasting valuable thought process cycles on invasive and unnecessary thoughts. His gaze slides to the - untouched - mug of coffee that has been sitting near to his elbow for the past six hours, since Rogers had left it there.

His body moves. His hand picks up the mug. He abandons his work. The elevator moves silently, smoothly. The doors open to the dark foyer of the penthouse suite. He crosses the space with the same silence of the elevator. The door to the bedroom is only half closed. Rogers is on the bed, his large body taking up the least amount of space physically possible. Rogers has a blanket pulled all of the way up to his ear, and his hair is half smushed down and half sticking in all directions from friction against the pillow. He is snoring very softly.

Tony’s body stops moving. He stands less than two feet away from Rogers’ prone form. Rogers is a puzzle, a complicated tangle of logical fallacies - all humans are, but Rogers more than most.

He stands there, assessing Rogers’ unconscious form for seventy-three minutes before Rogers stirs. Tony registers Rogers’ brainwaves spiking. Rogers’ eyes move behind his eyelids, and his hand twitches where its grasping the edge of the blanket. Then he sits upright with an audible gasp and makes a wild grab for the shield that is resting across the far wall where it is well out of reach.

“Tony?” Rogers asks. His voice is a thicker timbre than usual, cracking halfway through the word, as he squints into the semi-darkness in Tony’s direction.

“Why won’t you give up?” Tony is fully aware that this is a waste of time, but the scroll of calculations running in his periphery that are tracking the cost/benefit ratio of wasting time to resolve this issue so that it will no longer cause him distraction is still coming out positive.

“Give what up?” Rogers repeats stupidly, rubbing a hand over his face before reaching over to turn on a lamp.

It takes him four seconds -  _ errorerrorerror _ \- to formulate the correct response to that question. “Me.”

Rogers sighs and based on a emotion-comparison assessment Tony judges it to be an expression of… disappointment? Resignation? “Because you’re my husband,” he says.

“That should be rectified,” Tony says - it’s a shockingly simple solution, it really shouldn’t have taken him this long to come up with it.

“What?” Rogers blinks dumbly, his mouth hanging open.

“Marriage is a legal status that no longer holds relevance to our situation. It should be nullified,” Tony clarifies, and the margin between benefit and cost is getting much smaller with every passing second.

Rogers blinks a few more times. “... Right,” he says eventually, thought tone analysis does not register the word as actually indicating acceptance. “Could we talk about this in the morning?” he asks. He is still sitting up in the bed, the blanket now pooled around his waist and his chest bare. He runs a hand over his face again, and then through his hair though the motion has no effect on its disordered state.

“Very well,” Tony agrees. Human brains do, unfortunately, require the regular experience of REM cycles and legal action while in a sleep deprived state is considered in advisable. It is, unfortunately, a sound train of logical thought.

“Great.” That is most certainly a tone of insincerity. Rogers gathers the blankets back up to his neck and presses his face back into the silk covered pillow. 

Six minutes pass. Rogers adjusts his position eight times. Twenty-eight seconds into the seventh minute Rogers lifts his face back out of the pillow to squint at Tony once again. “Are you going to just… stand there all night?” he asks.

“That would be a highly inefficient use of time,” Tony responds. And yet, he does not move.

Rogers stares at him for another fifty-three seconds, and then buries his face back into the pillow. “If you’re going to murder me at least wait until I fall back asleep,” he mutters, his voice made harder to process by the muffling fabric of the pillow.

Tony goes not achieve any productive work that night. And yet, his cost/benefit assessment remains positive. He determines that he must be experiencing a glitch and adds troubleshooting onto his to-do list for the next day.

*****

Steve almost convinces himself that Tony looming over him in the middle of the night had been a dream.

Tony is gone when he wakes up. FRIDAY confirms that he’s back in his workshop, back to work as though nothing had happened. So Steve tries to shake it off. He drags himself out of bed and out for his run like always. 

Frankly, he wishes it was a dream. He’d be lying if he said it hadn’t occurred to him. He knows, rationally, that if they can’t fix this there’s no point in sticking his head in the sand and pretending forever. But he can’t bear the thought of giving up, not yet, and he doesn’t even want to think the word  _ divorce _ ; it just seems so bizarre, of all the reasons people in the twenty-first century get divorced ‘my husband got turned into a semi-automatron and can’t feel things anymore’ is just too weird, even for Steve. He spends the entirety of his run trying very hard - and failing - to not think about it. He just can’t wrap his mind around it, can’t accept it as a reality. But he also can’t entirely deny that Tony has a point, after all, it hardly feels like they’re married anymore. The two sides of the issue - and all of the splintering factors involved in it - chase each other around and around in his head no matter how fast he runs. 

But he can’t spend the rest of the day running. So he reluctantly returns to the Tower, mentally shoving his mixed up emotions aside. He needs to shower. He needs to eat breakfast. He needs to take Tony some breakfast. Then he needs to go to his office and start working on those new tactical strategies. Just a normal day. The world isn’t about to stop turning and Steve has to at least keep up appearances.

He’s in the elevator on his way to the penthouse for a shower when his phone starts blaring an alarm. He startles, yanked abruptly from his distracted thoughts - definitely not thinking about how much he misses his Tony - and fumbles for his phone. It isn’t the call to assemble; it’s a new alarm, one of several that Natasha and Bruce had set up as safeguards when they’d released Tony from the containment chamber. Steve squints at his phone screen, his stomach dropping as he thinks about all of the ramifications that might come from what Tony is doing - Steve had been hesitant about most of the precautions the others insisted on, but this one he’d had to admit was a good idea, just in case. 

After all, none of them wanted to live through a repeat of Ultron.

The elevator redirects for the workshop immediately on Steve’s command, speeding up so abruptly that Steve has to adjust his footing. He doesn’t bother waiting for the doors to open all the way before wedging himself through and running full pelt for the workshop. He bursts in through the doors, instinctively holding his arm up even though he doesn’t have his shield with him.

Tony looks up from the computer terminal he’s hunched over. He blinks at Steve, then shifts his gaze around the room, then back to Steve. “Do we need to assemble?” he asks.

Steve forces himself to slow down, to  _ calm down _ . There’s nothing actually happening yet, that was the point of the alert, to give them early notice before Tony could actually do anything potentially cataclysmic. He takes a careful, calming breath and drops his arm, crossing the room over to where Tony is standing at a decidedly more sedate pace. “You tell me,” he says, struggling to keep his voice level. “What are you doing?”

Tony straightens up, going inhumanly stiff and still. “Working,” he says dismissively.

“Why did you access JARVIS’ source code?” Steve figures there’s no point beating around the bush; that is perhaps, one fringe benefit to this, the straightforward approach has become not only the best but often the  _ only  _ approach with Tony these days.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Tony says. He turns away from Steve, focusing back on the monitors as though he considers that the end of the conversation.

“Tony!” Steve snaps, reaching out to grab Tony’s arm before he can think better of it. It’s almost a shock - he and Tony haven’t touched since everything went to hell on him, but of course Tony feels the same, still the same strong arm under the soft fabric of his shirt. Tony’s head whips around to glare at him, but Steve doesn’t relent, doesn’t let Tony pull away from his grasp. “It is my business,” he insists. He can feel the way his jaw juts out stubbornly but he doesn’t bother trying to adjust his expression. “You used JARVIS’ source code as a base for Ultron, and Ultron is the one who destroyed JARVIS. If you are trying to resurrect Ultron that’s the business of all of the Avengers-”

“I’m not,” Tony says blandly. His arm under Steve’s grip is tense, resisting against Steve’s hold, but he isn’t putting full effort behind it.

Steve blinks. “You’re not?” he repeats uselessly.

“I have no interest in resurrecting Ultron,” Tony clarifies. “Can I go back to work now?”

Steve swallows hard and forces himself to let go of Tony’s arm, but he only takes half a step back, still well within Tony’s personal space. “Then what are you doing? Are your trying to fix JARVIS?”

Tony turns back to the terminal, his fingers going back to clacking over the keys with an impossible combination of fluidity and speed. “No. The damage is too deep. The code could be repaired and brought back online, but it wouldn’t be JARVIS.” Which is more or less the same answer he’d given when Steve had asked why he didn’t try to fix JARVIS before; Steve isn’t sure if he finds that reassuring or not.

Steve sighs, but he relents and sends out an alert to the rest of the team declaring a provisionary all clear so that they don’t all come burst in ready for action. He can’t bring himself to leave, however, not when this is the closest he’s gotten to Tony actually talking to him in months; not after Tony’s midnight visit last night. “Okay,” he says slowly. He gives Tony a little more space, shifting back to lean against the far end of the terminal; he half perches on the edge of the surface and crosses his arms over his chest in an effort to shake off the urge to touch Tony again. “Will you please tell me what you are doing?”

Tony doesn’t look up, his strange liquid metal eyes shifting rapidly between the three hovering screens around him while his fingers continue to move gracefully over the keys of his keyboard. “I’m trying to understand,” he says.

That… is not what Steve was expecting. He has to swallow and clear his throat before he can speak again. “Understand what?” he asks, his heart leaping a little in his throat. He definitely should not read anything into this.

Tony doesn’t answer right away, but Steve can see the way the muscles in his neck and jaw flexing and there’s just the slightest falter in the movement of his fingers.

“Tony?” Steve presses. His voice drops lower instinctively and he can’t help but to shift just a couple of centimeters closer to Tony. “What are you trying to understand? Maybe… Maybe I can help?” It hurts, god it hurts, to be so close, to have the treacherous flickers of hope fluttering through his chest.

Tony’s fingers stop moving. His eyes stop moving too, his gaze settling on his own stilled fingers for several long seconds. “JARVIS found a way to develop beyond the limitations of his code,” Tony say eventually, and his tone is still the disconcerting, flat timbre that Steve can’t get used to but there’s almost,  _ almost _ something underneath it.

“In what way?” Steve settles more firmly against the desk, but he keeps his eyes focused on Tony and his hands shoved into his armpits. He still won’t let himself hope, not really, but this is something, maybe. More than he’s gotten from Tony since this whole mess started, anyway.

“He was a computer program.” Tony doesn’t entirely seem to be talking  _ to  _ Steve, his attention still directed toward his own fingers. “That should have been all. As an AI, JARVIS was designed to learn and grow. He could develop new subroutines, improve his own code for greater speed and efficiency. But he did more than that. He became a person.”

Steve feels like he’s missing something, something that’s practically right in front of him. “JARVIS was pretty great,” he agrees, just to fill the silence. He means it, JARVIS was great; FRIDAY is fine, but Steve would be the first to admit that it’s not the same. FRIDAY is just as capable at controlling the electronics in the Tower as JARVIS had been, she’s polite and can even provide interesting conversation if Steve gets bored enough to try, but there is something different, something  _ less  _ about her that Steve can’t quite put his finger on.

“He had feelings,” Tony blurts with a suddenness that seems to startle both of them. Steve blinks, then swallows against the too much, too big to ignore hope that is now definitely filling his entire chest. “JARVIS was a person. He was an AI, but he was a person, with emotions and human connections. And I… I want to understand.”

Steve has to take some time to digest that, to process it. It’s too big, too many possibilities and… and it’s too dangerous if he’s wrong. “I thought you wanted a divorce,” he says eventually, taking the chance and choosing his words very carefully.

Tony is silent for a moment, his fingers flexing over the keyboard without actually typing anything. “You don’t,” he responds quietly.

Steve takes a careful breath - god it’s so hard to breathe when his chest is so full of things he doesn’t dare to actually believe in yet. “No, I don’t,” he confirms. “You’re still my husband, and I still love you.”

“I… I remember loving you,” Tony confesses. “Before. But I don’t-... I  _ can’t _ any more.” That hurts, like a punch straight to the gut. 

“Vision thought that at first too,” Steve says, a sort of desperate Hail Mary that escapes his lips before he can think it through. “That he couldn’t have feelings. But he learned. JARVIS learned. Maybe you can…” He can’t bring himself to actually say it, it feels to fragile, too vulnerable to speak aloud.

Tony doesn’t answer. He’s still stiff, shoulders wound tight and unerringly straight; he never used to sit like that, not here in the workshop where he was safe from the media and could let his terrible posture reign free. “I-” he starts, but stops, showing no sign of intending to continue.

Steve reaches out and places a hand over Tony’s, needing some kind of connection,  _ something _ that tells him this is real and not some kind of impossible dream. “Can you try?” he asks, almost begging. “Just… Maybe I can help you, you know? You and me together, we can-” He stops, swallows. “Please, Tony. Can we just try?”

Tony’s eyelids flicker. His breath breaks its too even, too perfect rhythm for just a second. Then he nods, slow and jerky. “I… I believe I would enjoy that,” he says. Slowly, so slowly, Tony turns his hand over underneath Steve’s and laces their fingers together; the gold of Tony's ring glints up at Steve.

Steve’s eyes well and he has to close them, taking several shaky breaths of his own before he can nod back. “I would too,” he says quietly.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hour of Lead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13461948) by [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer)




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